Monday, 22 May 2017

In April, 14,496 scientists from 107 countries participated in the European Geosciences Union (EGU) General Assembly in Vienna, Austria. Over the course of the five-day conference there were an astounding 4,849 oral and 11,312 poster presentations, with several authored by staff from the British Geological Survey. The BGS Stable Isotope Facility was represented by Jack Lacey, Melanie Leng, and Andi Smith. In this blog they report on their week at EGU and tell us about the work they presented on lake and speleothem records...

This year we travelled to EGU to share new results from work carried out as part of two large international research projects, the Hominin Sites and Paleolakes Drilling Project (HSPDP) and the Scientific Collaboration on Past Speciation Conditions in Lake Ohrid (SCOPSCO) project, and from a detailed speleothem record from Northern Spain.

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The HSPDP looks to understand how environmental change influenced human migration out of Africa using long sediment cores recovered from five lakes in the East African Rift Valley. Our main research at the BGS Stable Isotope Facility focuses on one of these sites in particular; Chew Bahir in Ethiopia. Isotope data were used along with other measurements from international colleagues to tell us more about what has driven climate change in eastern Africa over the past 500,000 years, and what conditions were like at the origin of modern humans and their dispersal out of Africa. We are still at a relatively early stage in the project, but it looks like climate had a massive influence on the adaptability of early Homo Sapiens which may have driven them to move out of Africa.

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Andi presenting his work on speleothem from Northern Spain

Moving from East Africa to the Mediterranean, Lake Ohrid on the Balkan Peninsula is one of the largest and oldest lakes in Europe, and contains many hundreds of unique species. In 2013, an ICDP drilling campaign recovered cores reaching 570 meters below the lake floor. This exceptional sediment sequence contains a continuous record of environmental change over the past 1.4 million years, and will allow us to study the influence of climate and geological events on evolution of the unique organisms in the lake. It appears that species in Ohrid are able to cope with both long-term and rapid environmental change, and unlike other old lake systems, there have been no major extinction events since the lake formed. The upper half of the core was recently the focus of an open-access special issue in the journal Biogeosciences.

Still further northward, Andi gave a talk on speleothem climate records from Cueva de Asiul in Northern Spain. This small but beautiful cave system has already provided insight into rainfall dynamics in southern Europe throughout the Holocene, in work published in Scientific Reports in 2016. However, this year’s talk focussed on the last 2000 years of the Holocene, showing a strong relationship between rainfall in northern Spain and changes in the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO). It is hoped that a more detailed investigation of this speleothem will help us to understand in more detail how the NAO has changed in the past and the impact that change had on different areas of Europe. Interestingly the speleothem also reveals a period of major environmental change around AD 1557, possibly recording major deforestation linked to industrialisation on the northern Spanish coast from which the Spanish Armada was launched only a few decades later.

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EGU is a very engaging conference and a great place for geoscientists to meet, and share and discuss their research. If you would like to find out more about any of the research above, contact information and links to our EGU abstracts are included below.